Just hack your way to victory, Mr President

On Tuesday, US voters go to the polls to decide the composition of the House of Representatives and possibly alter control of the Senate. And on 22 November, Dutch voters will go to the polls to elect a new government.

Until last week, these elections had one thing in common: both were to be conducted by means of voting machines - essentially PCs adapted to run specialised software for recording votes. So far, so modern. But on 30 October the Dutch minister of internal affairs suddenly announced that 1,200 voting machines (about 10 per cent of the total) had been found to be unsafe and must be replaced by other machines or by paper-and-pencil voting. In the US, however, plans for automated balloting remain serenely unaffected by the concerns that prompted the Dutch decision.

Hooray for the conscientious Netherlanders, then? Er, not quite. The minister's decision was a response to some public-spirited campaigning by a group of techies who had purchased a couple of the Nedap/Groenendaal ES3B voting machines and subjected them to some tests. They discovered that the machines could be opened by a key easily purchased on the internet; they could be put in administrative/supervisor mode by entering the secret password 'geheim' (which means 'secret' in Dutch); and that the ES3B was vulnerable to software tampering that would allow a criminal to inject code that transfers votes undetectably from one candidate to another.

Oddly enough, it wasn't these flaws that forced the ministry's hand, but the further discovery that the ES3B emitted enough electromagnetic radiation for its operations to be monitored by snoopers, thereby violating the constitutional requirement for secret ballots.

As a result, municipalities that had planned to use the ES3B have gone into panic mode. There was a stampede to purchase the alternative - and supposedly safe - voting machine, but supplies soon ran out. Officials in Amsterdam, having decided to go back to pencil and paper, discovered that some ingenious jobsworth had sold all the old ballot-boxes for €25 apiece - and the Dutch media have been gleefully unearthing the uses to which their proud new owners have put them. (One has made an attractive barbecue from his.)

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, arrangements for electronic voting are all in place, from which you might conclude that the Americans have managed to avoid the pitfalls that have so discomfited the Dutch.

Not so. A group from Princeton University obtained a Diebold AccuVote-TS for tests - the most widely deployed voting machine in the US. On 7 November these machines will be used in 357 counties, covering nearly 10 per cent of registered voters. They found that malicious software running on a single AccuVote-TS can steal votes with little risk of detection.

The software can modify all the records, logs and counters kept by the machine, so that even forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss. They wrote demonstration software that carries out this vote-stealing attack. They also found that anyone who has physical access to a voting machine, or to a memory card that will later be inserted into one, can install such software in one minute flat.

Needless to say, Diebold has attempted to rebut these findings. To a layperson, however, the strangest thing of all is the refusal by both manufacturers and electoral officials to implement the one measure that would restore faith - a simple requirement that every machine produces a paper trail that can be used for subsequent checking.

This reluctance is so irrational as to make one wonder if there really is something going on. At a recent Cambridge symposium on Iraq, one of the panellists was a former senior member of George Bush Senior's administration. A student began a question with the words 'When George W Bush won the 2000 election...'. The panellist interrupted him. 'If he won the election,' he said, smiling sardonically.